Ep. 165: Jennifer Zick, Founder & CEO of Authentic, The Science of Fractional Marketing and The Secret Sauce of a W-2 Talent Pool

Leaders, 

Eight years ago, Jennifer Zick set out to create a new marketing standard. She noticed that marketing was becoming ever more chaotic through growth in new tools, channels, and models. She also saw the rise of marketing executives who could make phenomenal fractional leaders, and noticed fractional leadership already existed for finance and back office management, but not for marketing. So she combined the two; marketing expertise and a fractional model, to offer what is now Authentic, a marketing consultancy that helps growing businesses “Overcome Random Acts of Marketing®.”

This episode follows two key paths. 

1. The science of marketing

2. The science of building a differentiated talent platform

Both are crucial for every leader building their team, org, and company. 

We all know growthis essential, but profitable growth, and actually understanding where your growth comes from, is increasingly difficult. If we gave you $100 dollars today, would you know where to invest that to create $110 dollars tomorrow? If you do, and Google’s SEO change disrupted your search traffic, would you know how to adapt? 

This brings up the first “aha!” for every leader - According to Jennifer, the purpose of marketing is to consistently answer four key questions: 

• Who do we want to matter to?

• Why do we matter to them?

• Where are they? 

• How do we get them to trust us? 

The second “aha!” will be how she built her company through a W-2 talent pool of fractional marketing executives. Two years into building Authentic, she made the difficult decision to transition from a network of 1099 independent contractors to W-2 employees, a move that came with an immediate profit margin hit. So why did she do it? She mentioned three main reasons: 

1. For a higher valuation, as 1099’s aren’t typically included in the valuation

2. To be able to control the client experience, since there is a tough balance of what you can tell independent contractors to do

3. To build a stronger company culture 

For leaders, marketing is a space to watch as flexible talent models continue to disrupt traditional structures. There are several great platforms paving the way, including Growth Collective (acquired by Toptal), We Are Rosie (Private Equity investment), and Wripple.

Key takeaways:

• Jennifer bootstrapped her way to scale her business. 

• Jennifer scaled her startup growth by balancing client delivery (50% of her time) and creating content that built a sustainable growth engine (50% of her time).

• Marketing has seen an explosion of tools, channels, and strategies. The result is that full-time marketing teams can’t keep up with the rise in tools, instead, they stick to what they know, exposing companies to missing out on the new tools or being disrupted if their competitors understand them. 

• The solution to the rise of this marketing chaos is having fractional marketing expertise - backed by a community of highly qualified specialists - to orchestrate your flexible network of marketing expertise.